Cloudmore Simplifies Office 365 Billing.

If you are already a Microsoft CSP provider, you will know that providing your customers with an understandable breakdown of their usage can be a challenge using Microsoft’s data from the Partner Center.

This is because of the way Microsoft calculates Office 365 subscription changes. Put simply, if there are any variations in the month, Microsoft credits the whole month, and then prorates the subscription on a daily basis. It is a fair way of billing, but if you have multiple changes in a month, understanding and reconciling your Office 365 bill can be problematic.

From the Microsoft breakdown will be able to view your costs, but how do you easily reconcile these costs and bill your customer? We know that most CSPs want to customize the price of each subscription for each customer, offering a discount to Microsoft’s recommended price or bundling support and other charges and uplifting the monthly subscription price. If you customize the sales price in any way, you will need to do the same prorate calculation to maintain consistency.

Cloudmore has implemented cloud billing scenarios into our platform for over 12 years, and we knew there was a better solution to this and we think our brilliant developers have cracked the code!

Your CSP customer pricing is managed in your Cloudmore price list, on a global or per customer basis and the subscription sales price can be changed individually or in bulk, by percentage. You can also create time-bound special offers.

After these steps, you or your customers, using Cloudmore self-service, can manage all the adds, moves, and changes within Cloudmore.

If you have already processed some billing periods, this data will also show in Cloudmore and, as you pass through each Microsoft billing period, the current data will appear. Our billing reports will show you a summary breakdown by customer and subscription, the advance payment for the upcoming period and prorated calculations. The prorated amounts are shown in an easy to understand format and have a pop-up explanation to make it easier for your customers to understand.

Our Recommendation

Our Office 365 billing recommendation is to send your customers a summary invoice and enabling them to view the invoice details, on demand, in Cloudmore. This simplifies the billing process for you and the customer but still allows your customer to see the detail if required. They will be able to see the same, but personalized, detailed breakdown as you.

To finish the billing process, export the data into Excel or connect your billing system via the Cloudmore systems API.

The same data you have seen in the view is exported and with minimal manipulation, you have the summary breakdowns required to bill, reconcile and analyze your CSP Office 365 business. This is how the summarized data looks in Excel:

Once set up, it should not take more than a few minutes to process your CSP billing every month.

Your finance, customer service and support teams will also be empowered with access to the data to handle billing questions quickly and accurately.

The scope of Cloudmore extends far beyond CSP and using the Cloudmore Custom Services feature enables any recurring or one-off service to be sold and managed and billed in a similar way to the CSP subscriptions.